SQL Failover Cluster Instance 2012 with Windows Server 2008 SP2 Failover & Failback took about 3 minutes plus to bring resource online

Marcus Wong Theen Nam 1,091 Reputation points
2021-04-05T09:35:14.567+00:00

Hi Guys,

I recently just setup a SQL Server 2012 Failover Cluster Instance on Windows Server 2008 SP2. When I do a failover test, it took about 3 minutes plus to completely failover to second node. Meanwhile, failback took the same time as well. I used to setup SQL Cluster in Windows Server 2012, 2016 and 2019, all just took about 10 seconds to complete the failover/failback. Don't understand why is this cluster on Windows Server 2008 took that long?

From cluster event I can only see a warning about the DNS server failure & that operation returned timeout period expired. The DNS server status of the cluster resource is OK and I can see it successfully registered the host record in DNS server.

Any idea? Is it due to OS version or above error logs causing this issue?

Thank you.

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  1. Jeffrey Williams 1,886 Reputation points
    2021-04-05T20:56:10.773+00:00

    How are you determining that it took 3 minutes to complete? If I recall - Windows Server 2008 will take time to move the disk volumes, and SQL takes time to recover the databases. If the transaction logs have a lot of data to be recovered - that can take a long time.

    So it really depends on what you are measuring to determine when the system has completed the failover.

  2. Cris Zhan-MSFT 6,601 Reputation points
    2021-04-07T02:45:36.243+00:00

    Hi @MarcusWong-9726,

    >From cluster event I can only see a warning about the DNS server failure & that operation returned timeout period expired. The DNS server status of the cluster resource is OK and I can see it successfully registered the host record in DNS server.

    Would you please show the detailed messages. Usually we can get some information from the Windows cluster log, SQL Server errorlog, and Windows event log.

    >Is it due to OS version or above error logs causing this issue?

    This seems to be more related to some problems if failover needs 3 minutes.
    It is also recommended to install the latest updates for SQL Server 2012 failover cluster instances to avoid any problems that have been fixed.